So, what have we learned…

If there’s one thing Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve never takes for granted, it’s having Lindsay Whalen as a point guard.

“She’s really, really special,” Reeve said Saturday after Whalen’s 17 points and five assists led the Lynx over Indiana 78-69. “I’m fortunate to have someone like her who’s been at the helm of this thing for my entire ride here in Minnesota.”

Picking up where she left off last season, Chicago’s Elena Delle Donne was pretty much unstoppable, with 31 points and eight rebounds in 33 minutes.

Friday was also the Sky debut of Chicago native Cappie Pondexter, who came home to the Windy City in an offseason trade with the Liberty and had eight points and four assists.

Delle Donne loves how vocal Pondexter is on court, and the way that keeps everyone focused and energized. For her part, Pondexter said she was just happy to do whatever she could to help Delle Donne be at her best.

Though Moore kept winning with the Lynx — two WNBA titles her first three seasons, plus a league MVP award last year — something seemed off. Moore discovered what many WNBA players before her have learned: Once you leave college, the public eye shifts elsewhere. Even the league’s national television contract with ESPN can’t equal the spotlight of an NCAA Final Four.

Privately, players fault the WNBA for ineffective marketing. That’s why Moore said she heard “a lot of amens” from her peers after her essay, “(In)Visiblity,” appeared April 30 in The Players Tribune, which tackled an issue vexing many of the WNBA’s players and coaches: How can a league with so much to offer generate so little buzz nationally? And what can be done about it?

The W.N.B.A. might exist in a separate world from the N.B.A., but it’s not in a vacuum, and the same philosophies that are shifting the men’s game have spread to the women’s as well. Three-pointers are being hoisted at higher rates, rigid positional designations are melting away, and teams are emphasizing pace, eschewing midrange jumpers, and obsessing over efficiency. Last Tuesday, amid the men’s playoff hype, the W.N.B.A. snagged some headlines when the Minnesota Lynx visited the Washington Mystics for what was billed as an “analytics scrimmage,” which featured new rules to reflect those trends.

Shafer said the committee likely would not have endorsed the four-quarter proposal on its own merits. Vital, he said, were two complementary components. Team fouls will be reset to zero at the beginning of each quarter. And only two of a team’s four timeouts will carry over to the second half.

These adjustments, Shafer believes, will reduce the frequency not only of second-half free throw interruptions but also of late-game scenarios in which multiple timeouts are stacked one upon another.

NCAA insiders expect the four-quarter proposal to pass. But response to the timeout proposal has been mixed — so much so that refinements seem possible, if not likely, before the first balls are bounced in November.

A sport with a huge upside could get smacked down if the NCAA follows through with the maximum punishment for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill women’s basketball team.

The Tar Heels, national champions in 1994, advanced to an NCAA Regional Semifinal in the 2014-15 season on a 26-9 record. But that team fared worst in the Notice of Allegations, released Thursday by UNC, that outlines five “level 1 violations” of NCAA protocol.

Just putting those words in her coaching biography, Ball State University women’s golf coach Katherine Mowat stood across worlds both utterly mundane in one light, yet brave and radical in another.

Look at any college athletic department’s website and any coach’s page, and you’ll find a rundown of personal information: spouse, children, often even a posed photo of a family together. In 2011, Mowat wanted the same.

Only while most of those spots list a husband, she was going to have her then-partner, now-wife Mandy Harrison listed. The couple were having their first child, and if everyone else had their family displayed proudly, why shouldn’t she?